The Myth of Nuclear Containment

Our thoughts are with our colleagues, friends and all the people of Japan as they continue to deal with the aftereffects of yesterday’s earthquake and tsunami. We are tracking the developments at Japan's nuclear plants as they race to try to avoid a meltdown.

Nuclear plants like the one at Fukushima were never designed to withstand a meltdown of the reactor core and wont. This is an excerpt from our Greenpeace Report : American Chernobyl:

The MYTH of CONTAINMENT:

For a reactor accident to have Chernobyl like consequences a meltdown must be accompanied by containment failure. Unfortunately the term “containment” belies the facts. The public interest community has long been aware that the containments around many of the US reactors are more myth than reality.

As early as 1971, government regulators knew that the public’s last line of defense against the radiation, the reactor containment, was virtually worthless yet licensed the General Electric (GE) and Westinghouse Ice Condenser reactors anyway. When an Atomic Energy Commission’s (AEC) staff member suggested that this type of containment design be banned in the U.S. the AEC’s deputy director for technical review responded that it “could well be the end of nuclear power. It would throw into question the continued operation of licensed plants, could make unlicensable the GE and Westinghouse ice condenser plants now in review and would generally create more turmoil than I can think about.” (See Appendix B.)

Of course the nuclear bureaucrats did not want to reveal the truth about the fallibility of the nuclear reactors they had already licensed as “safe” and attempted to withhold the information from the public.

Only though the efforts of the Union of Concerned Scientists, their attorneys and those at Public Citizen did the information eventually come to light under the Freedom of Information Act.

In 1986 Harold Denton, former director of NRC's Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, again acknowledged this vulnerability while speaking to utilities executives at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Denton noted that, according to NRC studies the GE Mark I reactors had “something like a 90% probability of that containment failing."

Jim Riccio has been Greenpeace’s Nuclear Policy Analyst since 2001 and has over two decades of nuclear activist experience. He currently directs nuclear policy work at Greenpeace USA. In the early 1990s, Jim served as the Campaign Coordinator for Greenpeace’s Nuclear Campaign.

not an expert of any means .dont claim to be in this field. to me it looks like nature is a vastly superior opponent in the running of the world. and ...

not an expert of any means .dont claim to be in this field. to me it looks like nature is a vastly superior opponent in the running of the world. and its just been proved that mans domination of the earth is very weak and fragile.
think that we have really read things badly wrong, as to how things actually work, rather than doing it wrong and just jumping on the first answer that comes to mind.
man obviously has a great intellect and reasoning.
maybe we are going in too quickly.

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(Unregistered) Avery
says:

Chernobyl, Really???? What happened their has to be blamed on the Russia (soory Russia):
On 26 April 1986, at 01:23 a.m. (UTC+3), reactor four ...

Chernobyl, Really???? What happened their has to be blamed on the Russia (soory Russia):
On 26 April 1986, at 01:23 a.m. (UTC+3), reactor four suffered a catastrophic power increase, leading to explosions in the core. This dispersed large quantities of radioactive fuel and core materials into the atmosphere[5]:73 and ignited the combustible graphite moderator. The burning graphite moderator increased the emission of radioactive particles, carried by the smoke, as the reactor had not been contained by any kind of hard containment vessel. The accident occurred during an experiment scheduled to test a potential safety emergency core cooling feature, which took place during the normal shutdown procedure

The test focused on the switching sequences of the electrical supplies for the reactor. Since the test procedure was to begin when the reactor was scrammed automatically at the very beginning of the experiment, it was not anticipated to have any detrimental effect on the safety of the reactor; so the test program was not formally coordinated with either the chief designer of the reactor (NIKIET) or the scientific manager. Instead, it was approved only by the director of the plant (and even this approval was not consistent with established procedures). According to the test parameters, the thermal output of the reactor should have been no lower than 700 MW at the start of the experiment. If test conditions had been as planned, the procedure would almost certainly have been carried out safely; the eventual disaster resulted from attempts to boost the reactor output once the experiment had been started, which was inconsistent with approved procedure.

I can't copy and paste all the details but if you would like to read on Chernobyl go here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
Every thing in their says fools running the power plant caused the problem. If they had the proper safety procedures and the plant had been built properly it wouldnt have happened. Even though i know this will get me no where because you guys want to burn coal. I agree about solar and wind, but it is costly to replace all at once.

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(Unregistered) It'sMine2
says:

I am beginning to believe the education system in the US is in trouble when I read some of these comments.You don't have to travel far around the glob...

I am beginning to believe the education system in the US is in trouble when I read some of these comments.You don't have to travel far around the globe to see the end results of man's failed technical follies and disastrous social experiments.Wars,greed,and the quest for power have used all the earth precious resources to the point of extinction,yet we are able to simply equate an environmental disaster like the one underway in Japan as a small accident.WOW

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(Unregistered) Howard
says:

If you are going to build something as dangerous as a nuclear power plant you should design it to be idiot proof, you do this not because the operator...

If you are going to build something as dangerous as a nuclear power plant you should design it to be idiot proof, you do this not because the operator is stupid but because they are HUMAN!. all critical parts of the plant should be designed to allow full control from a REMOTE location, this is done ensure that an accident dose not turn into a disaster due to the plant personnel becoming incapacitated. the plant should also be designed in a way that robots could easily be sent in to manually turn valves or make repairs during a critical incident.

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